A Man of Few Words

'Nobody knows how much I owe that man', Primo Levi said of his Italian compatriot Lorenzo Perrone, who saved his life at Auschwitz. 'I could never repay him'. Each day for a period of six months, Perrone, who worked beside Auschwitz in desperate conditions, risked his own life to smuggle part of his own soup ration to Levi, quietly leaving the mess tin by a half-constructed brick wall. Without those extra five hundred calories, Levi could not have survived, and would probably not have written 'If This Is a Man', the first published account by a Holocaust survivor. In 'A Man of Few Words', Carlo Greppi pieces together the life of Lorenzo Perrone, a bricklayer from the Piedmontese town of Fossano, not far from Levi's native Turin.